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It is generally thought that two groups are the big winners of the past two decades of globalization: the very rich, and the middle classes of emerging market economies.

The statistical evidence for this has been cobbled together from a number of disparate sources. The evidence includes high GDP growth in emerging market economies, strong income gains recorded for those at the top of the income pyramid in the United States and other advanced economies, as well as what seems to be the emergence of “a global middle class” and casual observations of the rising affluence of Chinese and Indians.

Last year, we sought inputs from the CSO/NGO community to strengthen the Global Monitoring Report (GMR) with stories that had a qualitative character of how people at community level had coped with the higher food prices due to recent food price spikes. The focus of the upcoming GMR, to be issued in April 2013, is on Rural-Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals. Clearly, domestic or in-country migration is a major contributing factor to urbanization. However, migrants’ expectations of better job opportunities or better quality and easier access to service delivery do not always materialize. Even though basic living standards, as measured by the MDGs, are often better in urban areas than in rural areas, this cannot be generalized for all residents of urban areas. Rural-urban migrants are quite often the ones who face a more challenging environment, particularly when expectations of finding a job are not fulfilled. Ensuring access to basic services, such as those defined by the MDGs, for everyone living in urban areas is one of the major challenges governments and citizens alike face during the urbanization process. GMR 2013 has set itself the task of bringing together a body of knowledge on this subject, i.e. how to make urbanization work for all.

What percentage of Sub-Saharan women under age 30 with a formal account use a community-based group to save? The answer is 26 percent, but until today you would have had difficulty finding that statistic. Not anymore. Today, the Development Research Group is publishing the complete micro dataset of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) dataset. This translates to over 150,000 individual-level observations, representing adults in 148 economies and 97 percent of the world’s adult population. Users can download the complete worldwide dataset, or datasets by country.

Looking through the jobs lens and focusing on the key features of the different country types can help identify more clearly the kinds of jobs that would make the greatest contribution to development in each case. This focus allows for a richer analysis of the potential tradeoffs between living standards, productivity, and social cohesion in a specific context.

In the developing world, a hospitalization is one of the things that families – especially poor ones – fear most. This came through in country after country in the World Bank’s Voices of the Poor exercise. Here are just some examples:

A man from Ghana is quoted as saying: “Take the death of this small boy this morning, for example. The boy died of measles. We all know he could have been cured at the hospital. But the parents had no money and so the boy died a slow and painful death, not of measles, but out of poverty.”

The researchers write that in Lahore, Pakistan, “a father explained that it had taken him eight years to repay debts acquired after he, his wife, and two of their children had been hospitalized.”

In “How Cities Can Save China” Henry Paulson, former US Treasury Secretary and current head of the Paulson Institute, argues in this week’s New York Times that better city planning will allow China’s investments to be more balanced, debt levels to be lowered, pollution to be eased, and a consumption windfall to be realized.

Suppose a political leader implements a policy that results in an economic crisis in the sense that, had he not implemented the policy in this instance, the crisis would not have occurred. In such a situation we are inclined to come down heavily on the leader’s policy and castigate the decision. This would however be a mistake.

To see the mistake—as to see so many things in life—it is worth converting this to a more abstract problem. A (fair) dice is about to be rolled; but before that you have to choose between A and B. If you choose A and the dice outcome is 1 or 2, or you choose B and the dice outcome is 3, 4, 5 or 6, all will be well. Otherwise, there is a major food crisis. What should you do? A little thought makes it clear that you should choose B. If after that the dice shows up on 1, there will of course be a crisis, but that disastrous outcome would not render your decision wrong. Indeed, if you had to play the game again, you should make the same choice.

For poor women and for women in very poor places, sizable gender gaps remain. In education, where gaps have narrowed in most countries, girls’ enrollment in primary and secondary school has improved little in many Sub-Saharan countries and some parts of South Asia. School enrollments for girls in Mali are comparable to those in the United States in 1810, and the situation in Ethiopia and Pakistan is not much better.

There’s nothing quite like a cold shower of shocking statistics to get you thinking. A paper that came out in Health Affairs today, written by my colleague Jishnu Das and his collaborators, is just such a cold shower.

Fake patientsDas and his colleagues spent 150 hours training each of 22 Indians to be credible fake patients. These actors were then sent into the consulting rooms of 305 medical providers – some in rural Madhya Pradesh (MP), others in urban Delhi – to allow the study team to assess the quality of care that the providers were delivering.

A lot of thought went into just what conditions the fake patients should pretend to have. The team wanted the conditions to be common, and to be ones that had established medical protocols with government-provided treatment checklists. The fake patients shouldn’t be subjected to invasive exams, and they needed to be able to be able to credibly describe invisible symptoms.

In an interesting post on “From Poverty to Power,” Duncan Green writes about our Chief Economist, Kaushik Basu. Commenting on a recent roundtable for CSOs held in London, Duncan highlights Kaushik’s views on redistribution, taxation, economists, climate change and multi-player sudoku. With his prior experience in the Indian Government and emphasis on thinking outside the ‘reductionist stereotypes,’ Duncan writes that Kaushik “could prove to be an interesting and innovative voice at the Bank…” Read the entire post here.

On November 16, Kaushik delivered a lecture at Brown University titled ‘From the Slopes of Raisina Hill: India’s Economic Reforms and Prospects’. Watch the video here. He’s posted a power point on ‘The Global Crisis and the Impact On Emerging Economies’ that was delivered at a UNU-Wider seminar on November 26.